Sunday, December 2, 2012

Photography. An Unique Perspective.

I recently found this article on Petapixel. Petapixel is a popular photo website that shares links to interesting photography things, such as rumors about new cameras, techniques, photographer's projects, random comparisons or statistics, etc. Check it out here. This article is about a photographer, Ian Ruhter, who thinks the digital age destroyed photography, so he made his own camera, which is now the world's largest camera, in the back of his van. Each photo costs him 500 dollars using a process called the collodian process.

The collodian process or "wet plate photography" is one of the oldest photographic techniques invented by Frederic Scott Archer and Gustave Le Gray in the mid 1800s that involves coating, sensitizing, and exposing a photographic material (I believe he mentioned himself using silver plates?) within about a 15 minute time frame. It forces the photographer to have a portable darkroom (where photographers edit/finish photos that aren't digital). One more popular form of this process was the tintype that continued into the 1930s. The process was replaced by the dry gelatin plate. One plus for this type of photography is the amount of detail it can capture, as seen through the photos by Ian Ruhter. It also always provides black and white photos (which in my opinion have something special about them, they're always interesting to me).

His photos: http://ianruhter.tumblr.com

He made a documentary about his work:

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